After an oil or gas well has been drilled, well operators often carry out various tasks to prepare the well for production of hydrocarbons. These tasks, known as completion operations, typically include inserting and cementing a casing or liner within the wellbore to prevent the walls of the wellbore from caving in. A downhole tool, such as a perforating gun, can then be conveyed downhole via a wireline or a wellbore tubular and positioned adjacent to a formation of interest. Once in position, one or more packers can be set, and explosive charges within the perforating gun can be fired to create holes, or perforations, within the casing, the cement, and the formation. In this manner, fluid communication between the wellbore and the formation can be established.
However, accurately positioning the downhole tool at the intended downhole location relies heavily on the ability to correctly determine the downhole position of the tool in relation to the formation of interest. Current solutions measure the length of the wellbore tubular as it conveyed downhole to determine when the downhole tool has reached the known depth of the formation. Unfortunately, these solutions are subject to improper or inaccurate measurements of the length of the wellbore tubular due to inconsistent lengths of tubulars, tubular stretch and compression, well deviations, and the like, resulting in erroneous placement of the downhole tool. Other solutions conduct additional logging runs to collect well logs which can be used to correlate the position of the downhole tool with the depth of the well. However, these logging runs often necessitate the removal of the wellbore tubular to deploy a wireline logging tool within the wellbore. Further, the additional logging runs required by these solutions are very expensive and time consuming, especially in offshore applications.